As previously indicated, a lot of people get
very upset at the suggestion that humans were ever cannibals, and some
scientists will use all sorts of arguments to deny that cannibalism ever
occurred. It is, they say, a brutal and racist attempt to denigrate fine and
upstanding primitive humans. Other scientists see such people as starry-eyed
idealists who have fallen prey to the 'Noble Savage' myth.

In science, the truth is indicated by
evidence, not by rhetoric or firmly held beliefs, or wishes, or hopes, or
disdain for the other side. A report in Nature (September 7) indicates that
undeniable evidence of human cannibalism has been found at a prehistoric
Puebloan (Anasazi) site in the 'Four Corners' region of the southwestern United
States.

Many of the bones show clear signs of
processing that is "consistent with food preparation." In the past,
opponents have suggested that this is no evidence that the bodies were eaten,
but may only indicate a form of preparation of bodies for disposal after death.
The evidence from this site, however, would appear to get around those
objections.

The site, which dates to around 1150 AD,
contains the remains of seven bodies of both sexes and various ages which had
been disarticulated, defleshed and cooked, in apparent preparation for eating.
The site, which was abandoned in a hurry, shows incomplete remains lying on the
floor of the site in what the finders interpret as "non-burial
contexts."

The remains of the pithouses on the site had
decayed slowly, rather than being either destroyed by fire or scavenged for
reuse, as normally happens at such sites. Stone tools on the site tested
positive for human blood, a cooking pot abandoned on the site showed traces of
human myoglobin, a protein found in human muscle, and, rather unusually,
fossilised human feces were found in the ashes of a hearth. These had not been
burned, indicating that they were deposited after the last fire on the hearth,
and these also contained traces of human myoglobin, indicating that whoever
left them there had eaten human flesh, as human feces do not normally contain
any human myoglobin. In other words, there is very little room here for any
hypothesis relating to funerary practices.

The myoglobin showed signs of being broken
down by digestive processes, and tests on 39 modern human fecal samples
returned no human myoglobin, not even in patients with positive blood in their
stool samples. About the only fallback left open to the 'deniers' is that
cannibalism has been recorded at times of stress (shipwrecks, the case of the
Donner party) and in certain ceremonial situations. They could still deny that
cannibalism was a normal human practice by arguing that the abandonment of the
site suggests something was wrong there, but it does not appear possible to
deny any more that human flesh was in fact eaten.

That is where the problem begins for those who
deny cannibalism as a human norm, because many other Puebloan sites show
collections of both human and animal bones with the characteristic cuts and
scratch marks that indicate that they have passed through a food preparation
process. So, even if they claim that this was an aberrant case, they have to
accept that human flesh was eaten on the site and, if it happened there, it
becomes much harder to explain away similar finds at other sites.

An accompanying 'News and Views' article in
the same issue of Nature, written by Jared Diamond, suggests that the problem
for those who deny cannibalism is that they see the practice as horrible, and
so they assume others must see it likewise. Diamond, an experienced bird
researcher in Papua-New Guinea since the 1960s, comments that PNG people find
many western practices equally abhorrent and unbelievable, while indicating no
discomfort in dicussing cannibalism.

As well, he argues, missionaries stamp out cannibalism
at the earliest possible opportunity, making it unlikely that people would
report openly if they did eat human flesh, and the descendants of cannibals,
having absorbed western values, are equally willing to deny that their
ancestors were ever cannibals.